Nowadays digital computing environments enable so called collaborative working environments in which a plurality of users are integrated over a communication network to cooperate around a common task. An example of such a situation is when an electronic document is arranged to be simultaneously accessible for a plurality of users and the users may perform pre-determined operations, even in real-time, to the document. For example, users may modify a content of the document together, e.g. write a book, and through the online collaboration arrangement increase efficiency in the creation of the document in question.
Traditionally, the collaborative document editing environment was implemented so that it enabled a single user to edit a document at the time. In practice this meant that users were allowed to edit the document serially (one user at any given time), each user taking his/her turn on making modifications to the document. This was called turn-based document editing. Users just had to be able to access the document (file), carry out the edits, and save the modified version back to the storage system. For the storage system, this required ability to lock a document file to be editable to just one user at a time. This capability was fundamental in file systems, shared network file drives and much later on, also in so called cloud-based file storage services which were initially designed to mimic the functionality of shared network file drives. Some of these systems offered other capabilities like versioning (version history) support, which turned out to be quite handy when enabling multiple users to edit a certain document, each user taking their turn, and versioning system capturing modifications made, allowing users to revert back to a certain previous version if needed.
Today, key aspect is that many document management systems, enterprise portals and cloud services enable users to upload their documents for storing purposes, as well as enable others to edit them as already mentioned above. Besides relying only on users to notify other users about the fact that a certain document has been modified or deleted, or about a new document made available for others to edit—these systems offer notification system which let other users to know about the actions a certain user did, either automatically, or based on users' voluntary action. As these systems authenticate users accessing and editing document, they use users' identity and enable other users to get (almost) instant notifications in case their action might be needed, or just in order to keep them informed what other user(s) just did.
This kind of automated notification system which tracks and communicates system's and users' actions to other users is one of the cornerstones of any cloud based document storage and sharing service. It enables people to be on the top of the content made available (and editable), and take action (edit a document) in case that is expected from them. These kind of notifications are delivered to the users in various ways; e-mails, integrated in-app messages embedded in various social media services, SMS messages and often also as core functionality embedded into some client/web-front end the users use to access a document-centric solution or an online service.
When bringing the above described aspects of prior art solutions into a practice, it is also necessary to describe a typical document editing process in a collaborative environment. Usually it goes as described in the following steps:                (i) Content creation, such as document editing, may start from desktop of computing device, using typical word processing applications available in the desktop environment. In this approach, a person (the initial editor) first creates a document using desktop word processing application, and then decides to make the document available for others to view and edit, e.g. shares it. In some cases, the initial document creation happens automatically by some document automation solution which generates the document by combining dynamic data content with pre-existing document template. Also, in some cases, the document creation happens entirely online, using some online editing solution instead of first creating the initial version of the document using desktop word processing application.        (ii) The initial editor or in some cases the document automation solution uploads the document file into cloud.        (iii) The initial editor may first edit the document using some online editing solution (either real-time co-edit, or turn-based).        (iv) After making sure (optionally) that the document, now stored in the cloud service, is ready to be shared with others, the initial editor shares the document by in-prompt defining to whom it should be shared, and with what kind of rights (view or comment only, perhaps edit too). It is also possible that the sharing happens based on initial creator's user profile, membership to certain user groups, organization or some other pre-defined detail which is defines the sharing scope.        (v) Depending on the online service where the document file was uploaded and subsequently shared, possible collaborators (either defined by the person who uploaded the initial version of the document, or perhaps a pre-defined group of people based on initial creator's user profile, may get notifications if somebody opens a document to view it, comments it or edits a document.        (vi) These notifications are (automatically) sent to the users “subscribing to that document”, and are in a form of “somebody did something to document X and thereby you should be aware of it”.        (vii) Quite typically the default mean to send the notifications is via email; some applications also support sending such notification messages into 3rd party service, within which they appear as private messages from external application/service, targeted to a certain predefined collaborator.        (viii) At some point of time now cloud-based document may be exported back to a format which allows editing and/or viewing on desktop. Once such export function is initiated, it concludes to file download into a local system.        
The prior art solutions have drawbacks. In some prior art solutions user needs to manually go through the document in order to find out what another user has edited in the document even if the user was informed, i.e. notified, that an edit was done to the document. Alternatively or in addition, the information in the notifications is typically very unsubtle and the notifications may also be delivered to persons to whom the information in the notification has no relevance. This kind of prior art approaches causes unnecessary disturbance to users being involved in the collaborative working environment as well as consumes unnecessarily time from users due to excessive information delivery lacking relevant details among other negative effects.
Hence, there is need for improvement with respect to the prior art solutions.